Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  The flicked light off exquisite bead embroidery stirred and stilled as Lysaer raised his head. His resonant voice filled the lofty chamber with assurance through the whispered rhythm of the peacock fan in the hands of the servant. ‘I would leave you your dignity.’ His sure, sun-browned hands stayed unhurried as he rolled up the parchment and looped its dangling ribbons over the split seams of the seals.

  ‘Shrewd man.’ The Lord Governor repeated his death’s-head smile. ‘I see I won’t need to remind you that the office lasts for life. But first you have to manage to win the common vote. Fail me in that, and the curse of my last breath will lie on you.’

  Not to be drawn by barbs masked in banter, Lysaer placed the scroll on the bed.

  ‘You’d wait for my liver to fail, first? Very well.’ The Lord Governor reopened irascible eyes. ‘I am afraid. The Master of Shadow has made himself scarce, and your guilds at Avenor have lost their edge in pursuit of their trade. Too few of your guard there survived Dier Kenton Vale to remind them of the perils still at large. Here at Etarra, we haven’t forgotten Tal Quorin, but those who witnessed the devastations there and at Minderl Bay are aging. I’m a suspicious man. I believe the Spinner of Darkness will return to sow evil on an unsuspecting, new generation. If so, the next decades are critical. Preventive measures must be sealed into place before my peer councilmen step down for their retirement.’

  ‘You mentioned two bequests,’ Lysaer replied. ‘Go on.’

  The Lord Governor barked a wheezing laugh that bled off into gasps and a pallor that left his jaundiced face runneled like half-melted butter. ‘I want new walls, prince. Rings of strong defenses that can be manned twenty-four hours a day. A siege here would be an ugly affair, soon over. The stone slopes of the mountains cannot sustain our large populace. We have no rain cisterns and no secure inner citadel.’ The pale, sausage fingers plucked and wandered on the coverlet, too palsied for vehement gestures. ‘I’d have defenses erected on the Plain of Araithe, where livestock and grain could be held secure to provide my city with sustenance. We have mountain caverns that could be set up for storage and granaries. I ask you to build Etarra into a stronghold for the Light, lest weak hearts and short memories fail your cause at Avenor. Will you do this? As my dying wish, I would leave the city’s interests in dependable hands. Yours, if you will accept.’

  Lysaer arose. Flecks of light arrowed and spun from his cuffs as he reached out and captured the Lord Governor’s hands inside his sword-callused fingers. ‘Consider your wish granted. Etarra shall have walls, each stone of them pledged to stand in the fight against shadow. A side benefit of thriving trade at Avenor, the crown treasury can find funds to pay stonemasons. Which keep do you wish to be named in your memory?’

  ‘The one overlooking the north, and Tal Quorin,’ whispered Lord Governor Morfett. His eyes flagged and closed, his vitality drained by the minimal effort of speaking. ‘Go in the Light’s grace, Blessed Prince, and ask a servant to send in my daughters.’

  ‘I’ll take the word to your family in person,’ Lysaer s’Ilessid said gently. He reached left-handed, pulled up a stool, and sat down. ‘But after you’ve heard what else the Light plans to secure your great city of Etarra.’

  He started to speak. Throughout, he held the Lord Governor’s ice-cold, moist hands firmly clasped in his generous strength. By the hour he finished, late afternoon cast tea-colored light through the sun-faded canvas of the awnings, and grateful tears seeped down the seamed chasms in the Lord Governor’s aged cheeks.

  ‘I can die unafraid of the darkness.’ Morfett settled, replete on his pillows. His bleared eyesight encompassed the man by his bed, but saw only stars set into a gold haze of brightness. ‘In the Light, may you win the election as my successor. Deny the s’Ffalenn bastard his crown at Ithamon, and rule long and ably after me.’

  Two months past the hour the death bells tolled for Etarra’s Lord Governor Supreme, Alestron’s state galley blew into her home port ahead of a black squall line that stitched the dark harbor with lightning. An adept from Ath’s Brotherhood had just finished blessing the shorn barley, and the last straw sheaves were bundled and dry in the East Halla lofts. As sun-browned as his field hands, Duke Bransian strode into the lower hall of his citadel. His servants knew all of his habits. Before he could bellow, a kitchen boy brought him a tankard of ale. The duke praised him for his foresight, then opened his mouth to slurp at the foaming head which spilled over the fist wrapped around the crockery tankard. Two deerhounds and a mastiff dropped in panting heaps at his feet, ears turned back to screen out the energetic noise of the household’s two-legged offspring. Children tumbled and laughed, or toddled sucking fingers, the dozens of nieces, nephews, cousins, and bastards indiscriminately mixed with the get of dairymaids, craftsmen, and servants.

  Clanblood held the concept of birthright in contempt; even five centuries after the uprising, a stablehand’s son could grow up to captain the guard, based on his mettle and merit.

  A girl runner dispatched from the harbor found the duke wiping ale from his beard, one boy of three years wrapped around his dusty boot. An apple-cheeked daughter, just able to walk, shared her bread crust with the deerhounds, and a third child, missing breeches, screamed with laughter and let the mastiff lick the jam off his face.

  ‘State galley’s back, uncle,’ yelled the messenger through the clamor. ‘Dame Dawr’s halfway up to the citadel.’

  Duke Bransian choked. Beer suds flew from his beard as he howled. ‘These weans are more muddy than the hounds in my kennels!’ He waved a huge hand at the oblivious sprawl of Alestron’s next generation. ‘Dawr finds them like this, she’s likely to nail all our skins to the gatehouse. Somebody better drag at least half of them out for clean clothes and dunk the rest in the horse trough.’

  As Mearn’s sharp-tongued wife took charge like a sergeant, the duke drained his beer at a gulp, glanced down, and found the girl still breathless at his shirttails. ‘What else?’ Lightning flickered; rising wind shook the glass in the stained-glass arches of the casements while the duke glared down at the child, one of Parrien’s, or Keldmar’s, to judge by her mulish, square chin. ‘Isn’t the old besom’s arrival quite enough to ruin my day?’

  A barrage of close thunder shivered the thick stone. ‘The brig Evenstar’s also inbound from the north,’ the girl resumed in a rush. ‘Lookout at Great Rock saw her masts in the channel before the squall line closed in. He sent a horseman. That man says she flies Keldmar’s banner and the pennant of the Fellowship of Seven.’

  ‘Dawr and an interfering Sorcerer, both on the same misbegotten day?’ Duke Bransian wiped the back of his hand on his sun-faded red surcoat; he was wont to wear his mail shirt, even in the barley fields, and his great sword never left his side. ‘Daelion’s cock and bollocks!’ He thumped his drained mug on the nearest trestle, raked loose straw from the shorn ends of his hair, and loosed a laugh that lit his gray eyes to a battle-crazed spark of delight. ‘Well, things just woke up and got interesting.’

  Then, belatedly aware of his own muddy boots and the sweat rings and stains on his shirtsleeves, he snapped new orders to the girl runner. ‘Find my wife or her maidservant and have one of them toss out a clean shirt.’

  While the child took to her heels and the dogs yapped and howled at the inbound storm, he stripped. Stained cloth and mail flew into a heap. His worn, quilted gambeson sailed onto the top. He kicked off his boots and strode through the side door unclad except for his hose. The deerhounds balked at going out. Forlorn and whining, they watched the lightning flare and crack. Then the squall broke. Rain hammered the cobbled yard to a froth of wind-driven current and puddles. The mastiff crouched on its haunches and endured in the open, sneezing mournfully. Grinning at the mayhem, since the weather matched his mood, Bransian sluiced his head and torso in the raging gouts of runoff that spewed from a gargoyle downspout.

  Alestron’s inner citadel had a high, slender tower with a top chamber secluded as an eyrie. The embrasure wa
s punched through with arrow slits. Their vantage overlooked the upper-fortress walls, and a view which encompassed the descending steps of town rooftops and the outer bastion that rimmed the canyon-steep cliffs of the estuary. Bransian s’Brydion favored the room for close councils. The site provided an effective deterrent against eavesdroppers. As an added advantage, it held too few chairs, a tactical point that gave graceful avoidance to the opinionated presence of family wives.

  The bullish bastion of male authority would have stayed uncontested, in any case. Given the duke’s openhanded invitation, the s’Brydion women would have kept their wise distance. Whenever the duke and his brothers met in parley, no firm decisions resulted. Accusations inevitably led to contentions that became spectacular, fur-ripping arguments. Experience had taught the ladies that each point of dispute would be repeated in exhaustive detail when their husbands descended to salve their wounds. They would hear the whole list of rife insults exchanged, the items at issue larded through with opinion on the mutton-headed faults of each sibling. Accustomed to the blustering nature of their men, the wives gathered in private to sort out the tangle with cool heads. Duke Bransian’s high-handed stubbornness had prevailed but a handful of times, and only if the women failed to reach a consensus or arrive at a sensible compromise.

  Those notable occasions when the Fellowship sent a Sorcerer to arbitrate, the four brothers’ wives shared tea and cake, and gratefully left the role of wise counsel and adroit restraint to the powers of higher authority.

  Grandame Dawr, at her whim, proved the indefatigable exception. Her hand latched on the silver head of her stick, she thumped up the difficult turnpike stair, crossed the landing, and perched like a sparrow in the massive oak chair appointed with the ducal blazon.

  Bransian deferred to her. Arrived at her heels, with his beard blotting moisture into his clean shirt and dry doublet, he kissed her cheek in greeting. His massive bulk always made the round chamber feel close as a closet as he unbuckled his broadsword and laid its russet leather sheath on the round oak table. Then, discomfited as a parade horse yanked back from a roll in the mud, he spun one of the smaller chairs backwards and straddled the seat to a squeaking complaint of glued struts.

  Outside, the storm snapped and thundered. Gusts winnowed fine dousings of rain through the arrow slits and licked trickles of damp down the walls, where a thin, channeled drain released the overflow through the bared fangs of a gargoyle crouched on the vertical stonework outside.

  Parrien stamped in next, his clan braid dripping, and the tops of his breeches plastered against the bunched muscle of his thighs. Word of the arrival must have caught him at the boards, since he still gnawed at the early apple impaled on the point of his dagger. Mearn dogged his heels, his narrower face contentiously thoughtful. A soaked raven flapped in from the stairwell, lit on a chairback, and beat the wet from its wings with a rusty croak of reproach.

  ‘Traithe’s here?’ Bransian bellowed through the opened doorway.

  ‘Aye,’ came Keldmar’s reply, spiraled through with the echoes that arose from the lightless depths one flight down.

  Moments later, the Sorcerer entered, black-clad and composed despite the lamed step he had wrestled through the ascent. His broad-brimmed felt hat had prevented the storm’s sheeting rain from streaming down his high collar.

  Keldmar, behind, had disdained all protections. Parrien’s near twin, and unrivaled for recklessness, he entered, skin wet, his boisterous, scuffed strides muffled by the squelching slosh of a salt-musty pair of holed seaboots. He unslung a waxed leather map case from his shoulder. The bronze ends clashed on wood as he banged it onto the table next to Bransian’s sheathed broadsword. ‘Who’s got oiled rags?’ he demanded point-blank. ‘Old storm’s damn well going to set rust stains on my favorite steel.’

  Mearn passed him the oil lamp from the hook by the doorway, ‘What,’ he said, mocking, ‘did you do to the Evenstar’s captain to keep her sniping nose on her brig?’

  ‘Feylind?’ Keldmar’s laugh boomed through his bristled wire beard. ‘Nobody forces that busy wench to do anything.’ He yanked out his knife and pried open the lamp’s reservoir, sloshed oil on the unkempt hem of his doublet, then drew his sword from the scabbard and commenced rubbing down the cold, blued length of the blade. ‘She booted ourselves off her decks at the quayside. Made sail back to sea straightaway, storm or no. Apparently she had a message to move southward, the contents of which wouldn’t keep.’

  As Parrien drew breath for some snide provocation, Dame Dawr rapped her knuckles on the tabletop. ‘Have you louts lost your ancestral ties to obligation along with your civilized manners?’

  Effortlessly strong, Parrien gave up the most comfortable chair and placed it for Traithe’s convenience.

  ‘Welcome to Alestron,’ Bransian said in sheepishly belated greeting. ‘How may we serve the land?’

  The Sorcerer sat and arranged his game leg to ease the sharp ache of old scars. The actinic play of lightning through the arrow slits deepened the lines on his face and lit the silver band on his hat to white fire. ‘Let Keldmar deliver his tidings first. Most of what I came to say bears on the news he brings from Etarra.’

  Dame Dawr bared her teeth. ‘What’s the mim-faced false godling done this time?’

  ‘You didn’t hear yet?’ Parrien leaned back, folded his arms, and crossed his spurred boots on the table. Clever as a weasel underneath his bluff brawn, he smiled in Keldmar’s face as he diverted everyone’s riveted attention. ‘Lysaer got himself legally elected as Etarra’s new lord governor the instant fat Morfett expired.’

  Keldmar howled, banged the table, and snatched back the stolen thread of conversation. ‘The funeral rites had barely ended when six chests of bullion were sent downcoast by fast galley. You won’t like the bent of the s’Ilessid pretender’s first act in office.’ He set aside his bare weapon, flipped the cap off the document case, and disgorged its contents overtop of the duke’s sheathed broadsword. Sheaves of rolled parchment unfurled with a hiss and revealed the penned plans for a massive, triple-tiered bulwark.

  Against sudden, stunned quiet, Keldmar retrieved his blade and resumed his unhurried polishing. ‘Lysaer wants to hire the best family of stonemasons working the Elssine quarries.’

  ‘The ones who practice the fragmented secrets gleaned from the old centaur lore book?’ Oak creaked as Bransian sat forward, his iron brows snarled to a frown. ‘That is bad news.’ While Traithe’s raven launched off the chairback and hopped onto the tabletop, head cocked in a purposeful survey of each inked notation for the proposed keeps, the duke added, ‘Ath’s angel of vengeance, is this massive array of new fortifications to be built on the foothills surrounding Etarra? Whom did you knife to make off with these drawings?’

  Keldmar shrugged, the salt stains on his jerkin glinting in the leaden gray light that shone through the storm-besieged arrow slits. ‘We don’t all share your bloodletting temperament.’ He released the wad of hem he had used for a rag and bent a considering squint down the cleaned edge of his sword blade. ‘A mutual friend drank beer with a guardsman and purloined his whole set of keys. These drawings are copies. The originals had to be found and recovered, though we made certain the blame would fall where it caused the devil’s own mayhem.’

  ‘Confusion to the enemy,’ Bransian allowed, unconcerned as the raven hopped over his wrist and pecked at an ink splotch on the outer edge of the parchment. ‘Whose silken feathers did you ruffle?’

  A wicked, hot gleam fired Keldmar’s gray eyes. ‘The rat-faced clerk in the treasury who pays out the bounties for the headhunters, who else? He’s now being tried for a turncoat.’

  ‘Well, you’d better have covered your tracks,’ Mearn cut in, his tone all acidic clarity. ‘Lysaer’s inquisitors are thorough. If the one posted at Etarra discovers your man’s honest, he’ll run down the list of his enemies until they have a confession and somebody guilty to roast.’

  ‘That slinker? Honest?’ Parrien laughed, s
lit eyed and restless under Traithe’s discerning regard. ‘The creep’s the same clerk who sells captive clan children to horse knackers. He’s also lined his pockets for years taking bribes to dispatch assassins for trade guilds. He’s made enough enemies to mince him to dog meat, and anyway, Keldmar’s only bone stupid when he wagers his best horses on one of Mearn’s swindling card games.’

  The sword struck the table with an outraged clang as Keldmar banged erect in raw temper.

  ‘Enough!’ snapped Dame Dawr. The wise raven took flight and settled on a cornice, as, snake fast, the old woman brandished her stick. She thumped the one brother who lunged to recoup his maligned character by thrashing Parrien senseless and quelled Mearn with the withering force of her glare even as he drew breath to liven the conflict with a choice round of baiting insults.

  While Keldmar recovered his blade and subsided, nursing a smacked wrist and grumbling, the grandame s’Brydion shifted her attentive glance to the duke and vented her acrid opinion. ‘I don’t like what I saw in Tysan one bit. The merchants there have grown fat on their greed. They stockpile gold with no fear for tomorrow, apparently too busy to question the talk that makes policy in their prince’s closed councils. I don’t trust the quiet, or such honeyed prosperity. There are intrigues running so deep in that city, even the whispers are silent.’

  ‘Althain’s Warden agrees with you.’ Traithe snapped his fingers and recalled his bird, who unfurled jet wings and dropped into a glide downward to reclaim a perch on top of his hat. ‘Sethvir sent me to ask you to consider sending three children of your bloodline to be fostered in the Kingdom of Havish.’

  Duke Bransian lifted offended eyes from the sprawl of plans in front of him. ‘These keeps at Etarra aren’t even built yet, and to my knowledge, our walls and defenses are solid. We held our own through the Betrayer’s last uprising, and watched Lysaer’s whole war host get tail whipped at Vastmark. Except for his sword-rattling musters at Etarra, he’s stayed in retreat at Avenor. Merchant trade is now running the heart of his policy. What under Ath’s sky makes Sethvir think us weaklings, that we should fear threats from such enemies now?’